THE GREAT WARRIOR TRIBES OF MUDIRAJA - MUTHURAJA

TRIBAL BACKGROUND OF MUDIRAJAS The Mudiraj - Mudiraja - Muthuraja warrior community is one of the ancient royal community of South India which obsorbed all kinds of warrior tribes into its fold. But the back bone population of this community came from Bhil, Bhil variants, Kolis, and Koli variants with hunting & fishing background. There are also their mixed blood clans / rajputs resulting from matrimonial alliances with Aryans and Scythians. Some of them having mixed blood became agriculturilists. These were the people of wild, militant, ferocious and warrior in their character. They were basically soldiers, commandos, daredevils, suicide squad members, administrators, ministers, chiefs, chieftains, kings and also emperors. It is a community that can not be easily forced to submit to alien rule and domination. When these warriors failed to win in open wars, they launched to gorilla warfare. Even they could dare to commit crimes against their enemies.

Dravidian Warrior Tribes were the sole rulers of ancient India till Aryans and Scythians (Sakas) arrived into this country. After their arrival, the native Dravidian tribes got mixed up with with them and developed matrimonial relations. Thus the Dravidian Bhils, Aryans, Scythians, Indo-aryans and Indo-Scythians ruled this country just like native Indians.These Indian and Indianised Hindu rulers resisted the Muslim invaders and the imperial British as they these new alien forces started grabbing their land, forests & country and also started imposing their religion, culture & customs on the native Indians reducing them to slaves.

It has been observed that the Mudiraj community of South India always fought with their enemies to protect their country, religion, culture and customs. They believe in freedom of worship and practice of their own tribal culture and customs. Mudiraja tribes became Hindus but they never stopped worshipping mother Goddess, the essence of tribal warrior religion. The great quality of these dravidian tribal sections is that they can accept all kinds of religious faiths in the world but they never forget their mother Goddess.

Many sections of Mudiraj ( Muthuraja ) community of South India include several Warrior Tribes that spread across the country from Sindhu River to Kaveri River Basins. A great many Mudiraja & related kings laid down their lives in opposing the Islamic invaders who tried to destroy Hinduism and their Hindu culture. The Mudiraja warriors also opposed and revolted against the British rule in India. They were all declared as Criminal Tribes by British when they miserably failed to control them from fighting against British Rule. Muthracha, Kallars, Maravars, Bedars, Pardhis, Kaikadis, Kuruvars, korawas, Boyars, Erukalas, etc are some Warrior Tribes of Mudiraja who were labelled as Criminal Tribes to deal with them mercilessly through oppressive methods.

Veera Pandya Katta Bommana, Rana Pratap Singh, Rani Abbakka are some of the great patriotic rulers belonging to Bunt - Mudiraja - Muthuraja warrior community & block. Hence, we must declare them as the first freedom fighters of India and salute them for inspiring our leaders like Mangal Pande, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and so on during British rule.

Denotified Tribes of India The Mutharacha ( Mudiraj ) caste was once the castes listed unde Notified Tribes by British and later on it was put in the list of Denotified Tribes (DNT) by Independent India.. Some years back, it was shifted to Backward Class list. Now the Mudiraj people are in B.C-D category. Now they are demanding for B.C-A status to gain competetive edge among BCs.

Time is very powerful and it changes every thing in this world from old order to new order. When the alien invading robberers became the rulers of India, the native Indian Warrior & Rulers were declared as criminals. Thus the Tribal Warriors were all branded and forced to become real thieves for the sake of their livelihood & survival. They became thieves because their countries, lands and forests were robbed by the invaders leaving nothing for them. What could they become, if not theieves and robberers ?

It may look like a crime as per the standars of present settled society, but it is their inherent militant & warrior quality to rebel gainst their enemy. It is for this great militant quailty, today we salute our beloved leaders Rani Jhansi, Chatrapathi Shivaji, Subhash Chandra Bose, Mangal Pande, Bhagat Singh and many others for their freedom fighting against British Imperialists.

Notified and Denotified Tribes of India The British had sought to control and contain these landless and nomadic "criminal tribes" through a series of Criminal Tribes Acts propagated throughout the different geographical and administrative units of India. The first Act, passed in 1871, applied only to areas in north India; however, in subsequent Acts, and particularly in 1911, the measures were extended to all of British controlled India, and altered to include ever-more draconian features.

The British colonial state looked with extreme suspicion at tribal communities that did not participate in settled commodity production. The resistance of some forest-based tribal communities to occupation of their forests also made them enemies of the state. In 1871, the colonial state passed the notorious Criminal Tribes Act to deal with these 'suspect' communities -- nomadic or forest-based -- and prepared a list of communities that were 'notified' under the Act as being 'criminal'. Members of these communities were seen to be "addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences". The Act provided for registration of members, restrictions on their place of residence, and their 'reform' by confinement in special camps where low-paid work could be extracted from them. By 1921, the Criminal Tribes Act was extended to all parts of India and new communities were continuously added to the list of 'criminal tribes'.

British declared the warrior tribes of Mudiraja as Criminal Tribes as a part of their cunning war against the first freedom fighters of India In 1871, the British Government of India "notified"certain tribes as "criminals" and passed the notorious "Criminal Tribes Act of 1871." Such people were notified, who, according to the British, were nomadic cattle grazers, wandering singers, acrobats, etc. Also those who resisted the British aggression from time to time. The logic was simple. These people lived in forests, or were nomads. Only the criminals would do this. As Indians follow caste professions, these mysterious (to the British) people too are hereditary criminals. Thus history's most heinous crime was perpetuated in this Act. From 1871-1944 this Act was amended, new areas and new communities were roped in. The itinerant traders lost their livelihood with the introduction of railways, roads and outsiders entering their lives. In 1952, Government of India officially "denotified" the stigmatised ones, without making any provisions for their livelihood. In 1959, Government of India passed the "Habitual Offender's Act" which is not much different from the "Criminal Tribes Act, 1871."

Since "criminal tribes" make such sensational headlines so frequently, the phenomenon needs to be examined historically in some detail. The people mentioned above are a staggering 60 million in number, and fall in the category of today's Denotified Tribes. The term "criminal tribes" was concocted by the British rulers, and entered the public vocabulary for the first time when a piece of legislation called the Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1871. With the repeal of this Act (which was condemned by Pandit Nehru as a blot on the legal books of free India, and a shame to all civilised societies) these communities were officially "denotified" in 1952.

After Independence, the government, realising that the Criminal Tribes Act was a shameful colonial legacy, repealed the Act in 1952. Tribes that were 'notified' became 'denotified'. However, the government did not simultaneously take any steps towards finding a livelihood for members of de-notified and nomadic tribes. They were left to their own devices.

Intensive research on the issue shows that about 150 years ago, a large number of tribal communities were still nomadic, and were considered useful, honourable people by members of the settled societies with whom they came into regular contact. A number of them were small itinerant traders who used to carry their wares on the backs of their cattle, and bartered their goods in the villages through which they passed. They would bring interesting items to which people of a particular village and a little further away - spices, honey, grain of different varieties, medicinal herbs, different kinds of fruit or vegetables which the region did not grow, and so on.

Almost invariably, nomadic people were craftsmen of some kind or the other and in addition to their trading activity they would make and sell all sorts of useful little items like mats and baskets, brooms and brushes or earthenware utensils. Some like the Banjaras or Lambadis functioned on a larger scale, and moved in larger groups with pack animals loaded mainly with salt, and their women in addition to the salt also bartered the exquisitely crafted silver trinkets with settled villagers. In addition, among them were musicians, acrobats, dancers, tightrope walkers, jugglers and fortune tellers. On the whole, they were considered a welcome and colourful change in routine whenever they visited or camped near a village.

There were several reasons for these communities first becoming gradually marginalised, and finally beginning to be considered useless to the settled societies. First, the network of roads and railways established in the 1850s connected many of the earlier outlying villages to each other as also to cities and towns. The scale of the operations of the nomadic traders was thus drastically cut down to only those areas where wheel traffic could not yet reach. This was the single most important reason for the loss of livelihood of a number of nomadic communities. Further, under newly imposed forest laws, the British government did not allow tribal communities to graze their cattle in the forests, or to collect bamboo and leaves either, which were needed for making simple items like mats and baskets for their own use and for selling. These two developments had disastrous consequences for the nomadic traders.

There was one other major historical factor responsible for the impoverishment of a very large number of nomadic communities. The nineteenth century witnessed repeated severe famines - during each successive one the nomadic communities lost more and more heads of cattle which were the only means of transporting their goods to the interior villages. The cattle were in fact becoming more crucial than ever, as with increasing network of roads and railways these communities had to travel longer distances to sell their wares. Loss of cattle meant loss of trading activity on an unprecedented scale

Denotified Tribes were the first freedom fighters These were the tribes who were the first freedom fighters of our country. They valiantly fought against Muslim invaders when they penetrated into India and later they also fought against British opposing their imperialism.

The British government gradually began to consider nomadic communities prone to criminality in the absence of legitimate means of livelihood. There was a parallel process taking place all along. A number of tribal chiefs, especially in the north, participated in the 1857 events, and earned the title of traitors and renegades with the British government. Elsewhere, hill tribes determinedly resisted the attempts by the British to annexe their land for establishing plantations, and to try and use them as plantation labour. A number of tribal communities, thus, would not yield to the British armed forces and consistently fought back, though whole habitations were burnt down in retaliation by the frustrated British officers deputed to co-opt them. Generally, it began to be felt that most tribal communities, including nomadic ones, were dangerously criminal. The Criminal Tribes Act was born in these historical circumstances.

A large number of communities were officially declared criminal tribes from 1871 onwards. The British government subsequently ran special settlements for them where they were chained, shackled, caned and flogged while being surrounded by high walls under the provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act. In the name of the homegrown science of "curocriminology" it was declared that they would be cured of their criminal propensities if they were given work and such an understanding had an obvious corollary: the more they work, the more reformed they would be. They could be thus forced to work for up to 20 hours a day in factories, plantations, mills, quarries and mines all through the first few decades of the twentieth century. This was an era when the Factories Act had come into existence, but the British employers were officially able to do away with those provisions of the Factories Act which restricted the number of hours of work in a day, or number of days in a week, or allowed minimal facilities at the workplace.

The story of the DNTs goes back to the early years of the colonial rule. In those times, whoever opposed the British colonial expansion was perceived as a potential criminal. Particularly, if any attempts were made to oppose the government by the use of the arms, the charge of criminality was a certainty. Many of the wandering minstrels, fakirs, petty traders, rustic transporters and disbanded groups of soldiers were included by the British in their list of criminal groups.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the tribes in the North West frontier had been declared 'criminal tribes'. This category became increasingly open ended and by 1871 the British had prepared an official list of Criminal Tribes. An act to regulate criminal tribes was passed that year. For instance, Bhils who had fought the British rule in Kandesh and on the banks of Narmada and were convicted under section 110 of the IPC were to be recognised as criminal tribes. The CT Act made provisions for establishing reformatory settlements where the criminal tribals could be kept in confinement and subjected to low paid work. They were required to report to the guardrooms several times every day, so that they did not escape the oppressive settlements.

The land possessed by the criminal tribes was already alienated during the colonial rule. After independence, various state governments have done little to restore their land to them. Schemes for economic uplift do not seem to have benefited them. The illiteracy rate among the DNTs is higher than among the SCs or the STs, malnutrition's more frequent and provisions for education and health care almost negligible since most of the DNTs have remained nomadic in habit. And above all, there is no end to the atrocities that the DNTs have to face.

The social category generally known as the Denotified and Nomadic tribes of India covers a population approximately of six crores. Some of them are included in the list of Scheduled castes, some others in the Scheduled Tribes, and quite a few in Other Backward Classes. But there are many of these tribes which find place in none of the above. What is common to all these Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs) is the fate of being branded as 'born' criminals.

Soon after Independence, the communities notified as criminal tribals were denotified by the Government. This notification was followed by substitution of a series of Acts, generally entitled 'Habitual Offenders Act! The HOAs preserved most of the provisions of the former CT Acts, except the premise implicit in it that an entire community can be 'born' criminal. Apparently, the denotification and the passing of the HOAs should have ended the misery of the communities penalised under the CT Act. But that has not happened. The police force as well as the people in general were taught to look upon the 'Criminal Tribes' as born criminals during the colonial times. That attitude continues to persist even today.

NHRC Recommandations The National Human Rights Commission, in a historic meeting held in February, 2000 has recommended repeal of the Habitual Offenders Act, which in effect replaced the Criminal Tribes Act after independence. The Habitual Offenders Act has spelt terror to these communities for half a century, as they can be still summarily rounded up whenever there is unexplained crime. The NHRC has also promised to take steps to monitor atrocities on these communities and reorient the police training systems to change the attitudes of the police towards them at all levels. It has also accepted the need to protect denotified tribes through a comprehensive package of welfare measure, including employment opportunities.